Once Again: Should Germany Ban the Neo-Nazi NPD?

Here we go again.  After police discovered a neo-Nazi cell in Zwickau that had committed murder and acts of terror for ten years leading politicians in Germany are caling for a ban of the far-right NPD:

German citizens and political leaders alike are appalled: For ten years, a group of neo-Nazis has ben carrying out a series of murders targeting immigrants - apparently without the country's intelligence services recognizing that there was a network behind the murders.

In response, German political leaders have made emphatic calls for the country's far-right National Democratic Party, the NPD, to be banned once and for all, after a first attempt failed in 2003. The Federal Constitutional Court, at the time, rejected the government's arguments for a ban, saying too many intelligence informers had infiltrated NPD ranks.

There are excellent reasons for banning the NPD:

• Members of the NPD have been involved in acts of violence and there are ties to quasi-paramilitary  organization, especially in eastern Germany;
• The NPD spreads a messge of hate and intolerance against "foreigners" (i.e. anybody who doesn't look "German") which has transformed certain towns into "no-go" sectors for tourists and Muslims.
• The policy of the NPD is contemptuous of parliamentary democracy;
• The NPD is behind historical revisionism, Holocaust denial and worse.

But to my mind there are better reasons for NOT banning the NPD:

• Banning the party will do nothing to stop right-wing hate;
• The banned leaders of the party could garner broader sympathy or even become martyrs to their cause;
• The NPD has never been a successful political force – in fact, in recent elections it has lost representatives at the state level.;
• The party is infiltrated with paid informants ("V-Leute") who are able to contain it;
• It is a "slippery slope" for a constitutional democracy to suppress political discourse, no matter how vile the views expressed.

Also, there is something inherently "German" in the reflexive call to forbid that which one finds offensive:

Die Deutschen lieben Verbote. Vater Staat soll seine Landeskinder besser vor sich selbst schützen, meint die Mehrheit der Bürger, wie eine Umfrage des Instituts für Demoskopie Allensbach für das John-Stuart-Mill-Institut für Freiheitsforschung zeigt.

("Germans love to ban things.  The majority of Germans believe that the nanny state needs to better protect citizens from each other, according to a survey conducted by the Institute for Public Opinions Allensbach for the John Stuart Mill Institute.")